Saturday, April 09, 2016

Protecting White Privilege in the United States

This is a pretty good interview with Nicholas Kristof, discussing race, inequality, privilege and the inability to perceive that privilege among white people in the United States. Comedian Bill Maher recently made a joke, that the idea of white Christians being an oppressed group today, which is being attacked on all sides, is bewildering, because there are no articles and videos of white pastors and priests being brutally attacked and sometimes killed by cops with itchy trigger fingers. Privilege comes in so many forms, and part of its power and the reason it is so difficult to give up, is because as a regime of knowledge and power, it comes equipped with ways of projecting blame elsewhere, or doing everything possible to justify and mystify it, even to the point of taking ludicrous positions that in any other context, you would see as being shameful and embarrassing. It is easy to not realize the ways in which the color of your skin privileges and protects a person, at so many different levels, because part of having great privilege is playing of games of imagining that it doesn't exist, or that all your great power and flexibility comes simply because you are better, or because you worked for it, fought for it etc. In order to protect that privilege, we see things such as the Trump campaign. In so many ways, the Trump campaign is a manifestation of the twisted world view of Fox News, whose business model is build on feeding off of white privilege, defending and protecting it, and attacking anything that might challenge it. The spaces of Trump rallies, are places where people can go, to truly inhabit their fantasies that they conjure up in order to deny their privilege and instead pretend that somehow, those who belong to what cartoonist Tom Tomorrow referred to as probably the most privilege group at any point in human history (white Christian Americans, and males in particular), are the real oppressed group, those who are really suffering and losing in today's America. But what they are angry about, what they are desperate to find again and willing to yell down or cut down anyone their path to secure again, is that feeling of unmarked, unquestioned privilege. It never truly existed, but there is always a nostalgia, that prior to the other gaining the White House, prior to them gaining respect or recognition, prior to them having rights, prior to them having the ability to speak or vote, we got what we wanted and no one dared to question us.

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Nicholas Kristof on what 'whites just don't get about racial inequality'
A conversation about race in America

Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson this summer, New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been running a provocative series
on the lingering barriers blacks face in America. The title of the
series: "When Whites Just Don't Get It."

And
each column has been met with, well, deep resistance to the very idea
that modern racial inequality is about anything more than differences
between people willing to work hard and those who won't. To Kristof's
credit, he keeps coming back with more data, more counter-arguments.

He's taken on a particularly
unpopular task: trying to convince whites who've often inherited
opportunity that America has just as systematically passed on
disadvantage to blacks.

"One element of white privilege today," Kristof wrote this weekend, "is obliviousness to privilege, including a blithe disregard of the way past subjugation shapes present disadvantage."

"I
was struck by the reaction to that: How many whites were very indignant
at the idea that there is a problem even with unconscious racism in
America in 2014," Kristof says in our conversation. "The tone of the
responses really struck me. That led to the first one, 'when whites just don’t get it.' And the response to each one led to the next."

NK:
People think they know about black history if they know about Martin
Luther King. There is a celebratory tone to the way whites understand
African-America history, which is of amazing, breathtaking progress.
That is truly real, that is to be celebrated. But I think
whites tend to be less aware of the degree to which past discrimination
shapes present inequity, and also the degree to which in some spheres,
African-Americans — and probably, especially young black men — face
continuing bias in law enforcement and the justice system and employment
and many other areas.

Among all the e-mails and tweets
and Facebook comments you’ve been getting, do you have any sense that
you’re changing minds, at least among some people?

I
wish I could say that yes, it’s having an effect. I honestly don’t know.
In general, I think that we in journalism tend to change people’s minds
quite rarely on issues that they have thought of. We tend to have an
impact most as shapers of the agenda. But where there’s an issue already
on the agenda, like race, I think it’s pretty unusual that we manage to
change people’s minds. The people who respond to the series, I would
say they don’t show much sign of having changed their minds, whichever
side they may be on. But it’s also true that those people may be more
passionate, more informed, and perhaps less likely to have their views
changed.

My
hope is that I’m reaching people, especially young people who don’t
know a lot about these issues, and haven’t particularly thought about
them. Perhaps to some degree, I can at the margin affect their view a
little bit.

How often do you hear the response that “we have a black president, so how can there be a problem”?

That
has been a fairly common theme. That goes into the triumphalist
narrative of black history that I often hear from whites. There’s
obviously something to that, it’s an incredible milestone. But it can’t
be used to obscure the fact that there’s still enormous inequity facing
so many other people.

Do you ever feel like that one fact
that people can point to — "the president is black!" — makes it harder
to have this larger conversation about racial inequality?

I’ve
wondered about that, whether that actually becomes an impediment to
having a serious conversation about racial inequity. I do think humans
have an incredible ability to self-select facts that will fit their
narrative. Even if that had not happened, then people would say "well,
the reason we haven’t had many black officials is just that too many
blacks don’t show personal responsibility, and that’s the source of the
problem." I’m just not sure it would really be that different if we
didn’t have a black president. But certainly one hears that all the
time, as "this is the end of the argument. There’s no point in looking
backward now. A black guy who really tries will be treated so fairly by
white people in American today that he’ll be elected president."

You
just touched on one of the themes you raise repeatedly in these columns
— personal responsibility. You write about the idea that it’s a lot
easier for many people to say "blacks should take more personal
responsibility" than to say "whites have some responsibility here, too."

That
surprised me a little bit just how much of the critical reaction that I
got was based on the "personal responsibility" narrative. That was
overwhelmingly the most common perspective that I got.

—that people who don’t succeed in life don’t succeed for lack of their own responsibility?

Exactly.
That just comes up over and over and over. And it’s something that
resonates with me a little bit because I grew up in rural Oregon, in a
blue-collar area that has been very hard hit by meth, by family
breakdown, by unemployment. And a lot of my friends and classmates have
been struggling with all these issues. There is a real issue of personal
responsibility and self-destructive behaviors — this is real. But it
also arises from a context of hopelessness, a context in which people
feel that there’s no escape, and then they self-medicate. And then that
hopelessness becomes self-fulfilling. And that’s true of whites, and
that’s true of blacks.

You've cited a lot of data in these columns that seems pretty powerful and hard to argue with.

People
were very taken aback by the figure in particular that the wealth gap
between whites and blacks today in America is greater than the black-white wealth gap was in Apartheid South Africa.
That was a factoid that clearly shocked a lot of people. But then the
lesson that a lot of people drew from it was "well, boy, that just
underscores how irresponsible so many African-Americans are," which is
precisely the opposite of the point I was trying to make. I think people
were shocked by some of the data that I cited, but I don’t know that
they were persuaded by it.

You use this phrase, which I’m
sure a lot of people have reacted to, that whites have a “capacity for
delusion” when it comes to thinking about their own role in racial
inequality.

I wonder whether that was impolitic of me,
whether it just made people defensive. As a journalist, I see delusion
all over, in all kinds of categories of people. So I’m kind of used to
the idea that all kinds of people are deluded about themselves and about
others. There are white delusions, and black delusions and Asian
delusions, and wealthy-people delusions, and poor-people delusions. I
probably didn’t intend to pack as much umph into the phrase as it was received with.

But
I think that there’s no doubt that successful people have this
narrative that "I succeeded because I worked hard, studied hard, obeyed
the law, and that just shows that anybody in this country can succeed if
they will just behave themselves." I think about my friends growing up,
who were in many cases, just as smart and hard-working as anybody else,
but didn’t have a family that pushed them. So if they made the decision
to drop out of school, that was a decisions that really haunted them. I
think it’s really hard for people who were born on third base, and
whose friends were born on third base, and who assume kind of a
third-base context, it’s really hard to understand the enormous
obstacles that face those who in early life encountered a much less rosy
environment. It’s so easy to hit a home run from third base and say
"boy, this is pretty easy, why can’t everyone else do this?"

Has writing about all of this made you think about advantages that you inherited, or ways that you were helped in your own life?

Absolutely. One of the things that we talk about in our new book ‘A Path Appears’
— that I had really been unaware of until we were going through the
research — is just how much early childhood matters. Your mom not
drinking or taking drugs during pregnancy. And in West Virginia, 20
percent of kids are born with drugs in their system. That’s just a
totally different world. So I think that we tend to have the wrong
metrics of poverty, and we tend to measure poverty in terms of income
per person, or in terms of wealth per person. I truly think the better
metrics of poverty would be how often a child is read to, how often a
child is hugged, the kind of support a child is getting in the first
five years or so of life.

I wonder if liberals like myself
overuse the word "inequality" because that tends to connote inequality
of outcomes, which conservatives are much less worried about. And we
should use the word "inequality" less and the word "opportunity" more.

Do
you think our ability to come up with policy solutions to racial
inequality is dependent on convincing more people of these ideas that
you say whites often don’t get?

I think there are two
kinds of arguments one can make for the policy solutions that matter.
One are these kinds of equity or social-justice arguments.

We should do this because it’s the right thing to do.

Exactly.
"It’s fair, it’s right." For those arguments to succeed, one really
does have to persuade people that these are real issues, and that it’s
not just about responsibility. But there’s another kind of argument that
I think one can make for the same kinds of policy solutions, which is
that it saves money. It gets you bang for your buck.

It’s more cost-effective to invest in early childhood than to pay for welfare once that kid grows up.

I
go back and forth in the arguments that I use, and I do think that it
helps that we’re getting better data and better research. While liberals
have always made some of these arguments, frankly, often the research
wasn’t robust. Now, more and more it’s coming from randomized control
trials, long-term follow-ups, really pretty solid evidence that it’s
hard to argue about.

One of the great improvements in social
justice in the last few years has been chipping away at mass
incarceration, and the reason that mass incarceration is on the decline
is not to do with social justice at all. It’s because it’s expensive. So, I’ll use any argument that I think may help advance the cause.

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Put Guahu / About Me

This blog is dedicated to Chamorro issues, the use and revitalization of the Chamoru language and the decolonization of Guam. This blog also aims to inform people around the world about the history, culture and language and struggles of the Chamorro people, who are the indigenous islanders of Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Luta and Pagan in the Mariana Islands. Pues Haggannaihon ha', ya taitai na'ya, ya Si Yu'us Ma'ase para i finatto-mu.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Haolified

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE HAOLIFIEDTinige’ as Guahu - 2003 (updated 2008)

You will not be able to ignore it che’lu * This time you will not be able to blame it all on Anghet * You will not be able to change channels * And watch Fear Factor, Rev TV of Salamat Po Guam because * The Revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be televised, nor will it be advertised * It will not be sponsored by the Good Guys at Moylan’s or the better guys at AK. * It will not be something easily explained by radio callers * Whether they be Positively Local, Definitively Settler, or Surprisingly Coconut * It will not be cornered by the Calvos and explained by Sabrina Salas * Matanane * After the story about the incoming B-52’s or 1000’s of Marines careening towards to Guam, and how we * should be economically energized and not terrorized. * Jon Anderson will have no TT anecdotes about it * and Chris Barnett won’t malafunkshun it because the revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be televised or editorialized * It will not be something canabilized with two inches here two inches there * Dubious headlines everywhere * Lee Weber will not edit it * Joe Murphy will not put it in his pipe and smoke it * Nor dream about it, or tell others the wonders and blunders of it. * There will be no letters to the editor quoting scriptures or denying its constitutionality * And there will be no American flag inserts saying these three colors just don’t run * As the revolution will not be editorialized

The revolution will not be televised or politicized * It will not play the same old gayu games * And promise you that same old talonan things. * The revolution will not wave at you as you drive by on Marine Drive * And seduce you with its hardworking eyes. * It will not be territorial or popular, and not encourage you with maolek blue. * The revolution will not put marang salaman po after its speeches to get more Filipino votes in the next election because the revolution will not be politicized

The revolution will not be televised, not be theorized * It will not be something GCC or UOG friendly. * There will be no books at Bestseller offering to help you lose something in 90 days * Or Rachel Ray helping you cook the revolution of your way. * Ron McNinch will not survey it * and will not poll people about their revolution of choice. * There will be no WASC review report demanding accountability demanding autonomy * And no beachcombing carpetbaggers will proclaim their own terminal authority * Over the histories, the laws, the thinking of those for whom they see nothing but corrupt and corrupting inferiority * The revolution will not be colonized

The revolution will not be televised, not be supersized. * The revolution will not be something you can buy at Ross, or get at blue light cost * It is not just red rice, kelaguan uhang, or popcorn with Tobacco sauce. * It doesn’t come with Coke and it doesn’t fit on a fiesta plate. * The revolution will not make you gof sinexy, cure your jafjaf, or make fragrant your fa’fa’ * The revolution will not force you to be where America’s empire begins * Or where Japan’s golf courses and Gerry Yingling’s credit card debt ends. * You won’t need a credit card, or be charged for the tin foil to cover your balutan * As the revolution will not be economized

The revolution will not be televised, blownback or militarized * There will be no more physical ordnance buried in people’s lands * And no more patrionizing propaganda buried in people’s minds * The revolution will not get you cheaper cases of chicken or increased commissary privileges. * It will not make freedomless flags feel more comfortable in your hands * Or make uniforms fit more snugly around your mind. * The revolution will not deny racism or exploitation * And not create histories about landfalls of destiny * But instead publicize the racism and evils of American hegemony. * The revolution will not be subsidized by construction contracts or the race of Senator Inouye or Congressman Burton * It will not be laid waste to by daisy cut budgets or Medicare spending limits * Instead it will be sustained by deep memories that refuse to die * The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised and will not polarize based on blood or color * It will not make your skin lighter * It will not make your skin darker * It will not test your blood the way Hitler or Uncle Sam would of done * It will not hate some and love others based on their time of naturalization * Or incept date of their compacts of free association. * But the revolution will help some find comfort, find strength, find power * In their connections to the land and to each other * Allow some to discover the sovereignty that can be found in solidarity * The revolution will take and remake this consciousness that doesn’t need to be televised * But does need to be revolutionized * The revolution will not be haolified * The revolution will not be haolified